Brick by Brick

Dana Awartani b. 1987, Saudi Arabia Follow +

Dana Awartani has been working around the clock to set up Saudi Arabia’s national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Shipments of the 29,221 handmade clay earth bricks making up her installation were delayed multiple times owing to the war in the Middle East, leaving her with just 10 days to complete what should have been a weeks-long process. It’s a laborious task: she and her team have literally constructed the pavilion, brick by brick.

 May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones (2026) is a floor-based installation composed of mosaics inspired by Middle Eastern sites of historical and material importance that form a pathway through which visitors can walk. It takes its name from a poem by Abu Nawas, an Arab-Persian poet writing in the eighth century. “His poem was basically criticising people who cry over ruins instead of people dying,” explains Awartani, speaking to me via video call the week before the biennale opening. “I kind of completely disagreed with that because I don’t look at cultural heritage sites as just brick and mortar. I do see them as vessels that tell our history, our story, the stories of people who built them—and it’s part of the people’s identity.”

Preserving cultural heritage has been a guiding principle for Awartani, who was born in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and is of Saudi-Palestinian descent. Her 2025 work Standing by the Ruins referenced the floor of a hammam in Gaza’s old city that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in 2023, while Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, as we stand here mourning (2019) referenced locations where cultural destruction was committed by Islamic fundamentalist groups. 

For this year’s biennale, Awartani has once again focused her attention on what she describes as the cultural destruction and cleansing taking place in the Arab world. “My pavilion really talks about all the cultural erasure—in a way, it’s cultural genocide as well—from Syria, Palestine and Lebanon,” she says. “I kind of wanted to make the viewer feel like we are all complicit in this—and you are part of the work”. 

The starting point for her research was to look at ancient mosaics from Mesopotamia. They had a huge influence, and the aesthetic travelled through the Roman Empire and then back to ancient Syria in the form of Byzantine-style mosaics. One example on her mind is the Bureij mosaic in Gaza. Discovered by a farmer in the Bureij refugee camp in 2022, the Byzantine-era mosaic floor is now on UNESCO’s list of damaged cultural heritage sites in Gaza, alongside 163 others.

Awartani’s almost-30,000 bricks were created in collaboration with woodworkers, brickmakers and draughtspersons specialising in Islamic geometric design. She rented a farm in the middle of the desert outside Riyadh and created a pop-up clay workshop where she and a team of 32 Saudi-based master artisans constructed the bricks by hand.

The process eschews the traditional binding agents of hay and sand needed to hold the mosaic bricks together. Awartani chose to omit those elements, so the bricks consist only of clay earth that has baked in the sun. The effect is a more fragile, delicate material with visible cracks. “In a way, it feels a bit like an archaeological site,” she says of the immersive installation.

 Choices like these are informed by the years Awartani spent studying traditional crafts. She left her home in Jeddah to study at Central Saint Martins in London, which she credits with teaching her about conceptual thinking and building a rigorous practice. “But there was little to no emphasis on making,” she says. “It was the thinking over anything, which I didn’t really love.” At the behest of her mother, who insisted she complete a master’s degree, Awartani enrolled at the Princes School of Traditional Arts in East London. “It was the complete opposite,” she recalls. “They’re like: ‘We don’t care that you’re an artist; you have to leave your ego at the door. It’s not about what you wanna say, you’re now a craftswoman.’”

“I kind of wanted to make the viewer feel like we are all complicit in this”

Awartani’s education in arts and traditional craft has been a process of re-education and decolonisation. Reading Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) while at Central Saint Martins was “very pivotal” for the artist, who then went on to learn more about her culture while at the Princes School. “Why did I have to go to London to learn about Islamic art and art from the Arab world?” she asks. She describes the process as one that has been “about unlearning Western canons of art, and then trying to figure out how I can figure out my own where it’s a combination of the two”.

She laments the way Western culture can still remain on a pedestal in the Gulf. “When you look at a lot of interiors of houses in the Gulf, they’re designed in a very European style,” she explains. “It was really bizarre to me and when I ask people, they’re like: ‘It’s more classy.’ I was like: ‘Why do you think Western culture is more classy than yours?’”

Despite these hangovers, Awartani is pleased by the inroads that have been made to support the arts in Saudi Arabia. The profession was not seen as a realistic career when she started; instead, many who might have become artists studied graphic design or architecture. Now, institutional support and a booming art industry has made it more of an option, which Awartani says is “really important, [because] I think art gives you a reason to live”.

As a Saudi-Palestinian, Awartani also sees it as sending an important message to have been chosen to represent Saudi Arabia at the Biennale. Both her mother and father’s family were forcibly displaced from Palestine and came to Saudi Arabia, making her the third generation born there. She is also the first Saudi pavilion artist from Jeddah, a place that has long been multicultural, given its proximity to Mecca. “People sometimes think of Saudi as a homogenous culture, when we’re really, really not—it’s so diverse,” she says.

Though she highlights her local identity, Awartani’s mixed background (she is ethnically Palestinian, part Syrian, has Jordanian nationality, and was born and raised in Saudi) has informed something in her work that also looks beyond national borders. “Do I have to be from one place? Most people are like, I’m this or I’m that, and I feel like I’m neither. I’m both.”

“It’s a rich, rich place… you can’t homogenise it”

This feeling is reflected in the pavilion, where the patterns and shapes on the bricks aren’t identifiable as distinctly Lebanese or Palestinian or Syrian. Rather, her installation is about recognising how much culture and heritage is shared across the region—and beyond. “You wouldn’t be able to look at a pattern and say this is very Syrian, because it’s also the same mosaics you have in Italy,” she says.

Asked how she wants visitors to feel when they are immersed in her world of clay brick and mosaic, the word “sad” immediately jumps out. “It’s really strange but, from my experience at least, people have more empathy for the buildings than they do for the people,” she reflects. “When I’m talking about Syrian crafts, it’s like ‘Oh my god, this is so devastating’—but Syrian refugees is a whole contentious topic. For me, they’re kind of integral because the people who I work with are the people who are these refugees.”

Awartani’s reflection on cultural loss, preservation, and the safeguarding of collective memory in the Middle East can be seen as a response to what she calls the “root ideology” behind the destruction that is taking place. She cites Israel’s attack on ancient sites in Lebanon during Easter this year. “It’s about erasing one history to create a false narrative,” she says. Awartani wants us to recognise the land as someplace more: “It’s a rich, rich place… you can’t homogenise it, and claim the land to be for one people only.” —[O]

Dana Awartani, May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones (until 22 November) at the Saudi Arabia pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Main image: Installation view: Dana Awartani, May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones. Photo courtesy the artist ,Visual Arts Commission, Commissioner of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia.